Posted
by
timothyon Saturday June 25, 2011 @02:40PM
from the good-thing-they-know-the-future-already dept.

newscloud writes "Envision Seattle has posted a model legal ordinance (pdf) for communities wishing to enshrine status quo net neutrality as law. The ordinance is co-authored by the legal group that helped Pittsburgh's city council ban fracking and corporate personhood last November. The concept of local municipalities defying FCC authority is troubling to some but the group counters that FCC authority actually violates certain rights that we hold as people, and the right to govern our own communities as an element of the right to community and local self-government. If we have a 'right to internet access' or a 'right to communicate' via these pathways, there are certain actions that can be taken by government which infringe on those rights. In our view, it's up to us to create these rights frameworks, and then enforce them at higher levels."

if you get a few good sized markets to require it then it'd be too expensive to maintain one net for the non-neutral and another for the neutral. The best part is since the Cable companies have chased off the FCC you can't even say it's their job. The only real trouble is the markets aren't usually big enough to stand up to Comcast et al, and it's just divide and conqueror. That's kinda why we have a federal gov't in the first place.

I wouldn't count on Seattle getting anything done. I've lived there my entire life and it would be quicker to push through change at the federal level. Decisions don't get made until the courts step in and say no more discussion. Seriously, we were going to have a monorail, and it would've been done by now, but after about four redo elections the permits were eventually yanked killing the project. The tunnel is in the middle of the same process where the opponents are trying yet again to vote it down even though so far they've failed miserably to do so. This debate has been ongoing for over 20 years since we learned that the design could collapse in an earthquake. And even a couple earthquakes in the meantime hasn't pushed the debate much closer to conclusion.

In 2005, the mayor proposed building our own municipal fiber to cover the last mile from the local IXP to the individual homes. Comcast wouldn't comment and Qwest claimed that they were already on it. It's been 6 years now, and Qwest hasn't done shit. I'm still stuck at virtually the same connection speed I've had for over a decade. Having increased from 4mbps to 5mbps.

This kind of ordinance makes sense once you realize how colonized by corporate lobbying our federal govt has become. If it weren't for legalized "corruption" inherent in Congress, we might not need more local law.

Exactly. The Federal government has become so utterly corrupt that States and municipalities are trying to enact their own laws to do things that are supposed to be responsibilities of the Federal government. But then, the FG is suing them for it! This is for many different issues, including illegal immigration, net neutrality, and more.

The solution is simple: the country needs to break up into smaller, more-manageable units. Republic-style (representative democracy) government simply doesn't work in la

The solution is simple: the country needs to break up into smaller, more-manageable units. Republic-style (representative democracy) government simply doesn't work in large countries; the government just turns corrupt. Of all the democratic countries, it's the small ones where the government is most effective and least corrupt.

Not so simple, sorry. You're a Pollyanna, Hellenic Greece already tried and failed at the City States idea, and have you no idea how passionate

Under the Clean Water Act, you only have legal standing to file a suit if you own property along a river or water system that's been damaged. You can only sue to recover monies equivalent to your loss e.g. you can no longer eat fish from the river. Monies recovered go to the Federal government, not to your local ecosystem for cleanup. With Rights for Nature, anyone shall have the authority to sue with an action in equity brought in a court of appropriate jurisdiction. See section 5b of the net neutrality or

The accusations of influence over teh Pennsylvania government outlined in the linked article, if true, are nothing short of fascism. I don't disbelieve them. I've been saying privately for quite some time that both major parties are just moderate fascists, and that the US has become a fascist country.

Moderate? Both parties are absolutely fascist, and the US has been a fascist country for some time now, it's just a lot more obvious now than it used to be.

People just don't believe me,

The problem is the "fascist" label. Poorly-educated Americans only associate it with Nazi Germany and Hitler and the Holocaust, and don't really understand the meaning of the term, which is corporate control over government. "Corporatism" means the same thing, but it doesn't carry the same weight that "fascism" does.Other even more poorly-educated Americans think it has something to do with Communism because it ends in "ism" and started in Europe at roughly the same time Communism did.

Actually as I understand it, in Fascism the government uses the corporations for consolidation of power and to build the war machine.

What we have in the U.S. is slightly different. It's the Corporations using the government as a puppet to rule. So I have often called it "Reverse Fascism," but Corporatism is the same thing. Both are about corporations having so much influence in the government that they're affectively ruling the country. If we aren't there yet we will be there shortly.

Aside from the(no doubt sticky) legal issues, there is the problem that for most purposes, the most 'local' portion of the network is not the limiting factor in the network's utility:

There've been a number of real-world cases, I believe in Canada, where the local good-guys-mom-'n-pop ISPs have been "neutral/non-throttling"; but the Evil Telco Empire from which they had to lease their access was engaged in throttling, so the fact that they weren't touching customers' packets didn't end up mattering much.

Section 7 – Exploration of the City of Seattle as a Direct Broadband Provider - If broadband internet access service providers providing service to residents of the City of Seattle violate this ordinance in ways which evidence a pattern and practice on behalf of those providers to interfere with the rights secured by this ordinance, the City Council of the City of Seattle shall explore the potential for the City of Seattle to become a direct broadband internet access service provider to the residents of the City of Seattle.

Well considering many states have monopolies by law ( 1 company for dsl, 1 for cable), competition will never exist.

As far as the RIAA throttling down your torrents so my online video gaming has low lag, I don't see the problem. Throttling has it's purpose, and if they were more open about it, they could offer me higher speeds. I'm in Maine with a 15mbit connection, that'll do 30mbit for like 15 seconds. If it wasn't for people freaking out over throttling, they would just give me a 30mbit connection and

What they need is actual working QoS like what that flag they have in the IP headers is for. I would gladly set my torrent traffic and bulk traffic to low priority QoS if I could figure out how. DPI shouldn't be necessary. Allow me to tell the ISP what's important some how and I will, and I'll try to be honest about it. Figuring out some way to do that for bulk transfers, and having routers accept that could help somewhat.

Well said. If this has been implemented for the last 5 years in every major OS (hidden from the average user, but not forced), it would have been a very easy and practical implementation, but I'm sure segments from the net neutrality movement would have railed against it.

I don't think people fully understand the consequences of forcing ISPs to do DPI just for QoS.

"Throttling has it's purpose, and if they were more open about it, they could offer me higher speeds."

That is assuming that throttling will be done in a responsible manner. But that is a pretty big, and probably not very realistic, assumption.

Until they got caught and threatened with heavy fines, my ISP (a large national provider) was throttling any and all BitTorrent traffic, without regard to what the content was. They had no idea whether it was legal or illegal, and they didn't care. (For that matter, determining its legality would have required Deep Packet Inspection, which is illegal in that context

And why were they doing that in the first place, just because they are evil? No, they were being forced to do that to combat all the illegal activity taking place. Now they can instead raise prices and put their users in jail, wow, what a great turn of events, I'm so glad they were forced to stop doing that.

There are a lot of potential solutions, some of them good, but lying to and cheating your customers is not one of them.

Their contract was to deliver a certain amount of internet service. It was, quite frankly, none of their goddamned business what their customers were doing with that service, any more than it is a telephone company's business to listen in on phone conversations to see if they are about something "illegal".

"... in first world countries like the US, bit torrent really offers nothing of value."

Far from the truth. A lot of open-source software (especially very large applications) use BitTorrent as their primary distribution method, because it eliminates the need to have an expensive central server (or many), from which people can download. I have obtained a lot of -- perfectly legal -- software that way. Firefox even used it to speed up major releases.

Movies and other works in the public domain also use BitTorrent preferentially. The fact is, BitTorrent is ideal for distributing just exactly th

I suspect that a much better deterrent to various nefarious telco practices is simply municipal fiber installs

Absolutely. If you want this, lobby your city council, get involved, go to meetings, get elected to the board if you have to. The whole point is that you are going to have to build grassroots support outside of the walled garden that is/. if you want to see this happen. There are a number of cities and municipalities that have done this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_wireless_network#Cities_with_municipal_wi-fi [wikipedia.org], so you'll have plenty of lessons learned to work from.

Disclosure: I'm somewhere between a libertarian and voluntaryist, and I'm against net neutrality laws/regulations.

But I'm happy to see this for a few reasons.

1) the idea of federal supremecy really rubs me the wrong way. States and municipalities, so long as they are not violating incorporated individual protections, should do whatever they like and tell uncle sam to fuck off. This idea that every single detail of our lives has to be managed from DC and has to be the same for everybody everywhere is really, really stupid and is very counter to the original vision of America.

2) If some people want something like net neutrality specifically, not doing it at the federal level is a great approach2a) I don't think the FCC really has any constitutional right to exist, but that ship sailed a long time ago. The idea that it has the power to impose and enforce net neutrality regulatoins is dubious at best.2b) I don't see that _all_ internet businesses eveyrwhere should play by arbitrary rules decided in DC. You could certainly envision high-density municipal internet services being provisiioned, used, and regulated differently than RRTA farmers in the dakotas. Let's let the people decide what they want at a _local_ level, and make businesses put up with it.2c) incidentally, having different rules and regulatinos for every little locality PROMOTES small businesses and regional operators, and dissuades mega-corps who want to push out local incumbents with federal power

Now, I used to live in seattle and hated the politics of that whole festering sore of hippie socialists. But, I long for the idea that their right of supreme self-determination should trump and invalidate whatever Uncle Sam has to say about it.

You argument sounds like you would want the USPS to be broken up into 50 state entities with different laws and regulations in each state. National infrastructure needs to be regulated on a national level. The internet goes across state lines, just like radio waves, therefore it's entirely constitutional for the federal government to regulate it, and was in fact the vision from day 1.

TV channel 37 is reserved for radio astronomy, do you really think scientists would have been able to purchase this from wh

that would be wonderful. It shouldn't exist at all, naturally, but breaking it up would be a fine start:)

Without conceding your overall point, I'll entertain that if you want to say that the feds should regulate trunks or long-haul links, you might have an argument. That argument wouldn't however extend to local ISP service, which is what we're talking about here.

Re: what some states would allow: absolutely. People come in at all different levels on the taxonomy of wants and needs. If you're wo

As an urban dweller, it doesn't bother me at all, but the purpose of the USPS is to ensure that you can send a package or envelope anywhere in the country for one fee. Regardless of how much it costs. I've been subsidizing those free loading rural residents for quite some time now, even as they vote to cut funding for things that I value.

It's the to benefit the same arrogant fools that continuously vote against government even as they collect their government provided farm subsidies.

Translation: I think it would be way cool if all of the lazy unproductive people would starve to death and/or die from lack of health care so that all of us hyper-productive individualist heros could have more cool toys to play with.

Translation: I think it would be way cool if all of the lazy unproductive people would starve to death and/or die from lack of health care so that all of us hyper-productive individualist heros could have more cool toys to play with.

Nonsense. I think that would be tragic.

But should that remain an accurate description of them or their behavior, absent voluntary charity, that would certainly be the _just_ outcome.

And any other outcome that relied on non-voluntary action would be, in aggregate, less just and

Are you willing to take the bad with the good? What if some communities want to do away with net neutrality, or regulate any of a myriad of other things we've looked to the feds to regulate up to now? Pushing those decisions down to the local level means that along with stuff you like, you're going to get stuff you don't.

You already have this. Cities pass ordinances that some people like and other find really annoying or wrong. So exactly how would this change anything? You don't like something then get people to rally around it and get it voted on to be removed or added or whatever. It happens at the local level and its the people directly around you deciding how they want to live rather than someone far away who has never been to your town telling you how you have to do things.

Are you willing to take the bad with the good? What if some communities want to do away with net neutrality, or regulate any of a myriad of other things we've looked to the feds to regulate up to now? Pushing those decisions down to the local level means that along with stuff you like, you're going to get stuff you don't.

Yes, so long as freedom of movement is undisturbed.

Pushing those decisions down to the local level means that you get much more stuff that you like and much less stuff that you dislike, provided that you're living in a like-minded community. And it's not all that hard to provide for that. You may never find a place where the consensus is in agreement with 100% of your views, but you can get a reasonably high approximation. On the other hand, when you have 300 million people voting over a single issue, it's

Well, part of the advantage of having these things done at a local level is that it's reasonable to consider moving.

Would you move to a different city that has better Internet? Perhaps. Would you move to a different state that has better Internet? Probably not. Would you move to a different country that has better Internet? No.

I thought this was a submission requesting Slashdot users come up with frameworks for software-based net neutrality tools.
Obviously there are some issues that can't be solved that way, but something like that could be turned into a simple browser add-in that would at least stop some types of abuse. If flat out filtering and bandwidth control were the only ways net neutrality could be harmed, THAT issue would be easier to tackle since it's pretty black and white, and everyone knows the right answer. When w

The companies that actually run the networks, including the mom-and-pop operations in small towns, "win," in the sense that they're the ones actually providing the service. "Community" doesn't run a giant network of networks. You might have something to go on, there, if you could point to the success of municipal networks that don't more or less immediately run out of cash and fold up (see countless recent examples that city taxpayers all across the country have become fed up paying for, and kill off). If

The "the right to govern our own communities as an element of the right to community and local self-government" is a can of worms that will cause major issues for any large companies or companies that work in many jurisdictions.

You make it sounds like democracy is a can of worms:) Ha, it is. Besides, there already is a patchwork of sometimes conflicting statutes across our country.
From the blog post... This work is about giving up hope that Congress is going to do the right thing, or State legislatures are going to do the right thing; and beginning to craft a structure of "rights" at the municipal level that challenges the hegemony exercised by those other levels of government; and then using the combined force of that municip

There already is a structure for municipalities to get their issues heard at higher levels of government. For example, in California there is the League of California Cities, http://www.cacities.org/index.jsp [cacities.org], which lobbies the state to change laws on behalf of communities in the state. On the state to federal level there is the National Governors Association, http://www.nga.org./ [www.nga.org] They advocate states issues to the national level.

If enough local governments advocated to their state leagues and enough Govern

The "the right to govern our own communities as an element of the right to community and local self-government" is a can of worms that will cause major issues for any large companies or companies that work in many jurisdictions.

Are you seriously arguing that democracy (and make no mistake: local government is what makes democracy actually work) should be curtailed because it makes life harder for big business? You have some rather strange priorities, in my opinion.

This whole issue seems to forget that DC is not a separate country. Everyone votes for representatives that go to DC. If you want a law that is controlled by the federal government changed the lobby your federal representative.

This assumes that it is possible or desirable to have a single law that's good enough for everyone. In practice, it often isn't. Pushing these things down on local level lets minorities (on federal level) decide what's best for them without having their preferences being

Are you seriously arguing that democracy (and make no mistake: local government is what makes democracy actually work) should be curtailed because it makes life harder for big business? You have some rather strange priorities, in my opinion.

Democracy on a local level sometimes causes NIMBY issues. I noticed that you did not make any note of the state laws that were cited in my post. A state banning importing of milk from another state? A state requiring only one label on apples? If you want to belong to a country you need to do what's best for the country and not necessarily just for your locality.

As for big business being bad, millions of people would not be alive if not for big business. How do you think you get most of your food, clothing a

es. I noticed that you did not make any note of the state laws that were cited in my post. A state banning importing of milk from another state? A state requiring only one label on apples?

That's why there's the commerce clause, which restricts undue interference by the states. I never said that everything should be handled locally - just that this should be the default, and things should be elevated onto the federal level should be treated as exceptions added on a case-by-case basis and with a damn good justification. Which is pretty much how the US Constitution does it already, per the Tenth Amendment.

So, for your specific examples: banning importation of milk in general would not be a good

But what, specifically, do you find wrong with pushing the particular law described in TFA to municipal level?

The specific instance is beside the point (I am in fact for net neutrality).The issue is that currently the Federal Government regulates ISPs and not local governments. If you want to change that then lobby your elected state and federal representatives to change that. Otherwise stay out of regulations that are not within a local government's area of responsibility.

Your example of your state making it illegal for local governments weapons beyond what state law restricts seems to be the same as the federal l

If every jurisdiction was allowed to make laws abut everything then the country would become a patchwork of sometime conflicting statutes. No company that works nation wide could deal with it.

That's a valid point. But lets turn the situation around and look at what happens to interstate commerce when the various telcos are allowed to turn their systems into walled gardens. It suffers. And in this case, the suffering is felt by thousands (tens of thousands) of businesses that have to pay to play over every system their packets travel. Or risk getting throttled.

Local control isn't a good solution. But in the face of Congress' unwillingness to fix the problem, the courts may have to say that 50 (o

There are some problems with enacting a local ordinance enforcing net neutrality: the measure can be taken to the courts and nullified even less expensively than it would take to fight a county-wide or state-wide law or the ISPs can simply refuse to improve infrastructure in the local municipality that enacts a net neutrality law as a form of retaliation. If the ISP refused to invest in infrastructure, it would cause some adverse reactions like diminishing land values because no one will want to live in an

Section 7 – Exploration of the City of Seattle as a Direct Broadband Provider - If broadband internet access service providers providing service to residents of the City of Seattle violate this ordinance in ways which evidence a pattern and practice on behalf of those providers to interfere with the rights secured by this ordinance, the City Council of the City of Seattle shall explore the potential for the City of Seattle to become a direct broadband internet access service provider to the residents

And when the telco's franchise agreement comes up for renegotiation, they might get tossed out of the towm.

I saw this coming years ago. If the FCC doesn't take the lead on a standard set of regulations that everyone can live with, every little wide spot in the road will write their own rules. Don't like the FCC's take on 'Net neutrality? How about several thousand unique contracts?

If Congress would simply get its sh*t together, stop listening to the "special interests", and allow the FCC to regulate ISPs as Common Carriers under Title II (as it should have from the very beginning), the vast majority of these issues would simply disappear, virtually overnight.

This came up in a thread with Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing, CELDF's Thomas Linzey replied "There are many things that currently prevent us from engaging in this new type of activism - one is preemption (both at the federal and state level); Dillon's Rule (the flip side of preemption which treats municipalities as children compared to the state "parent"), and corporate "rights" (that activism such as this violates corporate constitutionally embedded rights, including bill of rights and 14th amendment protecti

Laws like this pass because there's no reason to oppose them vary hard. They are illegal to enforce on their face and would result in potentially billions of dollars in liability for even attempting to impose them.

So the laws get passed, the companies ignore it and go forward anyway.

Maybe but in Pennsylvania, drilling companies have backed away: "Major gas exploration companies such as Chesapeake and Cabot are reducing their drilling significantly — and others like Talisman Energy have shifted some of that drilling to places like Texas where taxes are close to nil and where there is little opposition to the drilling unlike western Pennsylvania where environmentalists have come out strongly against the drilling and the city of Pittsburgh has passed an all-out ban." http://pittsbur [cbslocal.com]

You have made the classic correlation = causation error in your assumption that the local ordinance in the Pittsburgh city area is causing reduced drilling over the entire state of PA. It is far more likely that aggressive state regulations, high nat gas inventories, a plethora of shut in wells and low nat gas pricing is what is causing reduced drilling in PA.

The United Nations has proposed to make Internet access a human right. This push was made when it called for universal access to basic communication and information services at the UN Administrative Committee on Coordination. In 2003, during the World Summit on the Information Society, another claim for this was made. In some countries such as Estonia,[3] France,[4] Finland,[5], the United Kingdom Greece[6] and Spain,[7] Internet access has already been made a human right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right [wikipedia.org]

Nobody ever notices the most important part of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, namely Article 29.(1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.(2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of moralit

Just because it is a right does not mean you get handed the access.... I have a right to keep and bear arms...did the government hand me a rifle or hand gun? NO.

A right to internet access means that if I pay to have the access, it can not be taken from me with out due process of law. (I.E. no 3 accusations and you are banned for life) and given that, I can not be banned from having access for the remainder of my life and more than likely, given the types of violations that would cause sanctions, the law would simply be able to reduce my connection speed tot he point that circumventing copyright would be impossible (think... dial up)....That is IF I CHOOSE TO EXERCISE THE RIGHT FOR AN INTERNET CONNECTION.

The United Nations has proposed to make Internet access a human right.

That's as far as I got before I rolled my eyes. Is the UN paying for it? It seems the people who call for things like internet access to be a basic human "right" are A) unable to pay for it themselves and want someone else to, or B) people who advocate for those previously mentioned, but also expect someone else to pay for it.

My kingdom for a mod point!

Further, there is inherent in this declaration of the Right to Internet Access the assumed obligation of someone to build that internet. Its not just a matter of someone having the RIGHT to BUY internet access. After all, a RIGHT (to free speech) is not something you have to pay for each time you open your mouth. Poll taxes were declared illegal, in part because they interfered with the RIGHT to vote.

So its a small step from the Right to internet access to mandating a governmen

What is wrong with you people these days?!? An inalienable right means your gov't can't take it away from you. It doesn't mean you don't also have to go out and get it from a willing provider.

Some of you Yanquis have completely lost the point of why you're still allowed to live there in (relative?) freedom. You fought for it and earned the right to be left alone there. Who "provided" the inhabitants of the USA with freedom from British ru

Anyone with even the slightest knowledge of logic can smell your bullshit a mile away. You tried (and failed, miserably) to hide a third premise in there. That a right to the labor of other people is slavery. That's pure, grade A bullshit right there. If a parent is required to care for their child, rather than drop it in a dumpster, is that slavery? When I am required to stop at a red light, is that slavery?

You anarcho-libertarians are so fucking full of yourselves that you think that you can exist as an island. You can't. Everyone in this world relies on the labor of others. That isn't slavery, and for you to call it that is absolutely disgraceful. Real slavery is when a child in India gets pulled out of school, locked in a room, and raped several times a day until she's too old and ugly, at which point she ends up dead in a gutter.

Requiring people to help each other out is how society has worked for all of human history. If you don't like it, feel free to end your life, as that's the only way your existence won't in some small way burden others.

Hey, my car is dirty. I have the right to a clean car, my friend over there says so. I require you to wash it, right now. After all, society works by helping each other out, doesn't it?

Saying "Say, how about helping me out with this?" or "Do this for me and I'll do something for you in return" is how society cooperates. Saying "I convinced some powerful organisation to put you in jail unless you give me that" is not cooperation, sorry.

If you want someone to fellate you, there's a giant number of "providers". Just go downtown and look for scantily-clad women standing on street corners. There's lots of providers all competing with each other, not one single organization. Of course, in most places this is an illegal service, but that's bad government, but you can still go to Las Vegas to find legal providers.

Finally, there's no reasonable argument that you need to be fellated. If you want to get off, use your hand, or convin

If you recognize that laws against prostitution are bad government do you also recognize that the reason we have sole-provider problems in some areas for internet service are _also_ bad government?

Of course, but the thing is, the solutions are different. For prostitution, the proper governmental action is to legalize it and regulate it in the interest of public health and safety (i.e., make sure the hookers get weekly STD tests, and don't allow them to work if they're infected). Prohibiting something that

I'd like to beleive there was a government that would protect my rights as its first and only priority and functoin. But so far, no such thing has existed in world history.

And so one wonders, "is the baby the same as the bathwater"?

As I said elsewhere, I am somewhere between a libertarian and a voluntaryist. If i were convinced that an ethical state were possible, I'd be a libertarian. But I'm no longer convinced the state can exist morally.

In other words, the lack of existance of a well known, successful anarchy doesn't preclude one from ever existing. And anarchy isn't my goal per se, my goal is more liberty.

Lets provide an example for him shall we?

"The most remarkable historical example of a society of libertarian law and courts, however, has been neglected by historians until very recently. And this was also a society where not only the courts and the law were largely libertarian, but where they operated within a purely state-less and libertarian society. This was ancient Ireland — an Ireland which persisted in this libertarian path for roughly a thousand years until its brutal conquest by England in th

If a parent is required to care for their child, rather than drop it in a dumpster, is that slavery?

Parents have a duty to care for their child, they are not required to do it. That is a pure straw man argument.

When I am required to stop at a red light, is that slavery?

Stopping at a red light does not take anything away from anyone, so this example fails utterly.

Everyone in this world relies on the labor of others. That isn't slavery,

It is not slavery if people work for each other voluntarily; this is what you are deliberately missing out. You need to miss this out because if you do not, you are admitting that you are a supporter of the violent theft of people's work, money and property for the "greater good".

Requiring people to help each other out is how society has worked for all of human history.

If a parent is required to care for their child, rather than drop it in a dumpster, is that slavery?

Where exactly are parents required to care for their children?

Here in Arizona, if a woman doesn't want to take care of her child, she can drop it off at any fire station, no questions asked. It's really too bad that more young women don't take advantage of this service, as so many of them are in poverty and doing a terrible job of raising their children.

You rely on the coercion of others all the time. People have to eat. People need a roof over their heads. As a result they toil away the majority of their lives at work.

How many people would work voluntarily if there wasn't a basic need for food, clothing, housing, etc? They might do something "cool" of their own choosing but they certainly wouldn't be making your morning coffee at Starbucks, flipping your burgers at McDonalds, killing and cutting up animals for you, growing vegetables for you. Modern c

Yet people used to be able to satisfy their needs for food, shelter, and clothing without government and without me. And some can even do it without any other humans around at all.

Not really true any more. It's not possible to just go out and "live on the land"; that land belongs to someone, either a private party or the government, and they're not going to let you just live there. Moreover, there simply aren't enough resources for people to live like this. That's why the hunter-gatherer societies disappeared roughly 9,000 years ago, and were all replaced with agricultural communities. There have been a few aberrations, such as the Native Americans in North America until 150-200 years ago, and also settlers moving out to "the frontier" and doing the same, but that's all over now and only existed because the Americas were geographically separated from the rest of the world by water. There simply isn't enough land and wild animals for everyone to go back to being a hunter-gatherer, or even a small number of people. The lifestyles aren't compatible (as good land is in short supply); your ideas are several thousands years out-of-date.

By that standard you have no rights at all, as all rights require someone else's "slavery".

This is not so. All the rights you have come into existence when you are born. They all stem from your right to self ownership. You own yourself, and all the fruits of your labor.

Property rights are the root of all rights. Your 'right to a free press' is actually a property right in the paper and ink you buy or make to distribute. Your right to publish is actually your right to distribute your property as you see fit. Your right to association is actually your right to take your own body to any place where

I like math too, but I like it for it's purity. Applying simple Algebra to society seems like a simplistic model.

Then the right to healthcare must equal "a right to the labor of other people (slavery)."

Yes look at all the Doctors being enslaved by the masses. Oh wait, that's right, you can't even give me a single example of that. However I could give you thousands of examples where people have become enslaved in debt, merely for getting medical care to survive.

This is why I hate philosophical debates that have no connection to reality, and worse, ignore the actual problems we have.

Yes look at all the Doctors being enslaved by the masses. Oh wait, that's right, you can't even give me a single example of that.

I think you are not going deep enough into this; if a country taxes people (theft) to pay for the healthcare of others, the doctors who perform the work are being paid with stolen money, and the people who provide that money are the slaves.

Its the same with the BBC. They take stolen money (the 'TV License' collected under threat of jail) and then provide programmes for 'free'. In every case, the taxpayer is the slave.

So then stop working. Slaves are forced to work, you aren't forced to work. Especially in the UK, you can stop working, go on welfare and not be a slave at all. By being a citizen of whatever country you are in, you are bound by their laws and contractually obligated to pay taxes. Move to Amish country if you want to get out from big government, you can ride your horse all day without being taxed.

I suppose you could think of having to pay taxes making you a slave, but what's the alternative. Without taxes

So then stop working. Slaves are forced to work, you aren't forced to work. Especially in the UK, you can stop working, go on welfare and not be a slave at all.

I'll bite. First of all, you cannot collect welfare if you are able to work, so you are indeed forced to work, and have a portion of your labor stolen from you. When you do so, money is stolen from you. Every time you spend money, 20% of the transaction is stolen, and if you are buying gasoline, alcohol or cigarettes the percentage is much more than that. Do you really think that its 'fair' that people can simply stop working and have everything provided to them by the people who do work? Even if it was mor

I have sympathy for what you are saying, but there's another point of view.

When you do so, money is stolen from you. Every time you spend money, 20% of the transaction is stolen, and if you are buying gasoline, alcohol or cigarettes the percentage is much more than that.

This is only when you purchase something using currency provided by the State. Bartering is legal and is not taxed, however when you use Dollars, there are lots of hidden costs that need to be paid for, like the fed reserve and all that jazz. When you purchase from a store, there are many more hidden costs, and the taxes pay for them. Food inspection, safety inspections, contractual laws, infrastructure, and all the other things tha

Perhaps I should concede that going on the dole just because you don't want to work and would rather live of the taxes from other people is ridiculously immoral and is becoming a huge problem in many 1st world countries.

I was a lot more Libertarian before I found out Australia has a $15/hr min wage with 4 weeks paid vacation and has lower unemployment than the US, which goes against the libertarian view that you can't just legislate wage increases

Taxes are used for the betterment of said society, either through security, communications, transportation, or the helping of it's citizens who are in need (among other things, overly short/simplistic list).

Taxes being used to help those in need of medical help, is a good use, in my opinion. It doesn't make me a slave because I pay taxes that might someday save YOU or the life of someone you care about. That's just misusing the word, slave,

The moment you start redefining words from their common meaning to support your extreme viewpoint, is the moment when everyone stops listening, because the rest of your logic becomes completely incomprehensible (how could it be otherwise, when you speak words but mean something entirely different from how people normally understand them?).

The fault is with 'common meaning' and not with the truth of what taxation really is. Its up to you to come to an understanding of what the truth is.

In all societies, public opinion is determined by the intellectual classes, the opinion moulders of society. For most people neither originate nor disseminate ideas and concepts; on the contrary, they tend to adopt those ideas promulgated by the professional intellectual classes, the professional dealers in ideas.

I won't bother with your points as such, since they have been re-hashed and debunked countless times already (as an ex-libertarian of the most extreme variety, I should know, having been on the receiving side of that!). Google is out there for everyone to use. Sapienti sat.

However, one thing I would like to recommend is that you do not speak for all libertarians ("we libertarians" etc). Your position is that of an anarcho-capitalists. Many - in fact, I would expect, the majority - of libertarians are minarc

You seem to believe that the right to property as you envision it is inherent in the matter of the world and has nothing to do with the State. In order for us to be able to choose to hold property laws in the way we do - a social choice that could take many different forms, and in fact does across countries and cultures and time periods within the U.S. (can I assume you're from the U.S.?) - we have a State to provide enforcement of the "right" to property (and money as a medium of exchange for property, etc

If you are going to invoke math in this sort of discussion at least get the frelling math right. Transitive equality is NOT a theorem. It is an axiom. It's truth in not proven, only assumed in most mathematical systems.

Therefore your use of it outside the context of math where it is an axiom is a logical FAIL unless you provide a set of axioms and a proof of it. Which you didn't.

I agree. If the county or city is allowing use of its right-of-way or equipment there should be no reason why it can't regulate it and require any company using it to be neutral. Charters for such things occur at the local level.

But I see no way a community could have any say about corporate personhood. The only way we are ever going to get rid of corporate personhood is constitutional amendment... and it's a constitutional amendment we most desperately need. Corporate rights were deliberately left out